For a "Historian" (Journo who's knocked out a couple more war stories that Clarkson J) Hastings appears flexible with his facts.

Let's take stock of what the Right have loaded into their Guns of August.

1. Gove's non-sequitur that we can't like Blackadder (25 years on) because the Kaiser was a wrong-un. (And it's all the lefties fault).
Aside that wee Pob is assembling a shitlist of un-conservative culture that'll make a nice bonfire.

2. It wasn't as bad in the trenches as we think because officer casualties slightly exceeded enlisted men as a ratio of either type.
This seems harder, but I'd expect a man with Max's distinguished military record to understand the distinction between Field officers and staff officers.
(If in doubt he could check Blackadder - which explains it rather well).
The fact that Captains and 2nd Leiutenants (Typically young men from Public Schools or University - but not necessarily of the ruling class) were dying at a comparable
rate to factory workers and agriculturalists is used to disguise the fact that the hardcore establishment (and any Edwardian ginger bullet magnets) were typically slumming it
in chateaux / command posts) some distance behind the lines.
It's a clever trick, but one that anybody with some military experience could see though.

4. The left started it - No in this case the Gove-Dacre axis did the equivalent of invading plucky little Belgium.
And their Ragged camp followers in the guise of Max Hastings and Boris De Pfeffel Johnstone are readying another assault.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead. Aristotle

Last year, two days after Baroness Thatcher died, Crow expressed a fervent hope that she would 'rot in hell'. There seems no reason why others should not now judge him as he once judged others.

Crow was a Marxist, Trotskyite, socialist — call him what you will, he was never sure himself — who saw class war as an ongoing smash-and-grab raid, in which his own function was to blackmail and bludgeon the keepers of the public purse to give his members whatever he could get for them, at whatever cost to innocent bystanders and taxpayers.

Here was a man who told a TUC conference: 'If you spit on your own, you can't do anything, but if you all spit together, you can drown the b******s.' When asked one day his view of an opinion poll which showed that the public was disgusted and enraged by his use of strikes as a weapon of first resort, Crow shrugged contemptuously: 'The only poll I’m concerned about is that of our members.'

He kept in his office a bust of Lenin, one of the 20th-century's major mass murderers. He called his dog Castro, in honour of the Cuban leader who has made his island a byword for poverty and repression. When told that some London businesses were threatened with bankruptcy as a result of transport strikes, he dismissed them as 'casualties of war'.

Crow played a role in British life similar to that which Arthur Scargill occupied in the Eighties, but much more successfully.

A friend who sometimes met Crow in TV studios told me yesterday that he found the man amazingly pleasant, and I am sure he was. Like Gilbert and Sullivan's off-duty burglar, 'he loved to hear the little brook a gurgling, and listen to the merry village chime'.

But Crow also did untold harm to the interests of the travelling public, and was shameless in admitting that he did not care a fig about the pain and financial damage he caused.

We need not now express such hopes as Crow did about Thatcher, for an afterlife of misery. May he rest in peace.

But none of us, save his fellow-comrades beneath the Red Flag, should have to pretend that Britain is a worse place without him.

Now we see what was really at stake in the miners' strikeThirty years on, the costs of the gutting of trade unions are obvious. That's why demonising Bob Crow was a failurehttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... s-bob-crow" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Tories got an absolute majority in Scotland in 1955, IIRC. But that was just Scotland, and it was an absolute majority of the vote, not of the people who were eligible to vote. Apart from that, I can't think of any examples at all - which just reinforces the hypocrisy of the law about calling strikes.

I wonder if Max voted for AV in the referendum?

"Don't tell me I don't want to know. Of course I want to know. I'll want to know even more if you tell me I don't want to know."

It is. Tories + Ukip got 51% together - fair enough. But it's a huge leap from that to saying that any significant number of Ukip voters definitely would have voted Tory if Ukip hadn't been there (we've seen/heard/read vox pops and articles ad nauseam from people saying that they're just voting Ukip to piss off the establishment - you know, institutions, like the government. The government that's made up of... Tories). It's a reasonable hypothesis - but at the moment that's all it is, a hypothesis.

"Don't tell me I don't want to know. Of course I want to know. I'll want to know even more if you tell me I don't want to know."

Agnes wrote:It is. Tories + Ukip got 51% together - fair enough. But it's a huge leap from that to saying that any significant number of Ukip voters definitely would have voted Tory if Ukip hadn't been there (we've seen/heard/read vox pops and articles ad nauseam from people saying that they're just voting Ukip to piss off the establishment - you know, institutions, like the government. The government that's made up of... Tories). It's a reasonable hypothesis - but at the moment that's all it is, a hypothesis.

And that's 51% of a 35% turnout = 18% if you allow a bit of a following wind.

In 2010 there were about 46m on the Parliamentary electoral register and they had about 10m votes. That means more than three quarters of the population either didn't vote for them or couldn't be arsed.